nuclear

Tag archives for nuclear

Three years after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, concerns persist about health effects while the cleanup poses ongoing health and safety challenges; workers in three states sue McDonald’s over wage theft; and the Senate passes a bill altering how the military addresses sexual assault allegations.

In much of the reporting I’ve seen on the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the plant workers are an anonymous, if much-praised, group. The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi digs deeper to tell us more about who some of these workers are, and what their experiences can tell us about occupational health and safety in Japan. He…

A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked: T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Daniel Zwerdling of NPR: Aftershock: The Blast That Shook Psycho Platoon Susan Milius in Science News: Backup Bees Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science: The Radium Girls (Part II, Part III) Frank N. Von Hippel on the New York Times Opinion Page:…

Mitsuru Obe reports in today’s Wall Street Journal that three workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been exposed to moderately high levels of radiation, due to contact with radiactive water on the ground. Their reported exposures of 170 to 180 millisieverts are less than the new emergency limit of 250 millisieverts, but…

The workers remaining at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station are braving extremely risky conditions as they try to avert a nuclear catastrophe. They are working to keep fuel rods – both those inside reactors and in the spent rods stored in ponds – cool enough to avert a Chernobyl-type meltdown, which would spew radioactive…